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Authors: Melinda Tankard Reist,Abigail Bray
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BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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The lived experience of pornography actors is the human face of research showing that physical and verbal aggression is “the norm rather than the exception in popular pornographic film” as noted by Ana J. Bridges (2010, p. 46). Bridges completed a content analysis of best-selling and best-renting pornographic videos available by catalogue in the USA, and found that
An industry unregulated and uncontrolled
Compounding the abuse so often involved in the making of pornography is a lack of regulation of the industry in all its forms. The shelves of corner stores and petrol stations are stacked with pornography promoting sex with ‘live young girls’, rape and incest, while pornography distributors continually flout Australia’s classification laws (see Tankard Reist, 2008). Abigail Bray has described an Internet site called
Passed Out Pussy
which incites crimes of violence against women and girls, and endorses rape, torture and hatred upon the bodies of young women (Bray, 2009). Other sites revel in the torture and enslavement of women.
For example, Ken Franzblau has written about photos on the ‘Slavefarm’ site: “These are pictures of naked women bound, gagged, chained, in a stock, and drinking from a dog’s dish. If there is a distinction between pornography and torture, it’s not detectable from these pictures” (2007, p. 262). There are sections on the site for auctions and rentals where you can sell, rent and purchase women, as ‘Female Slaves for Sale’. These representations of women and the hatred expressed in them are reminiscent of propaganda for the 19th century slave trade (see Hawthorne, this volume).
However, against this background, attempts to bring Internet content into line with existing classification laws and the treatment of illegal material in Australia have met with virulent objection by vested interests. Requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter out a blacklist of URLs containing extreme and violent pornography has been proposed by the current (Labor) Government. This material can be legally viewed in no other medium. As Australian author and Professor of Public Ethics, Clive Hamilton, has argued:
and Federal Government Websites were shut down in a cyber-attack and inboxes of members of parliament were flooded with pornography (Davis, 2010). This sense of entitlement to ‘our pornography’ entails defending the ‘right’ of the pornography industry to market child rape, violation of women and girls, and female slavery to anonymous consumers, all in the name of freedom of speech. If we consider this ethically acceptable, whose rights are we defending?
The Swedish scholar, Max Waltman, has analysed the shielding of these kinds of abuses behind the screen of ‘free speech’. He details numerous cases where law makers, judges, and other arbiters dismiss claims against even some of the most violent pornography, or where those in breach of various laws in various countries are only given ‘penalties’, such as community service.
Waltman responds to the common refrain of pornography defenders to ‘avert your eyes’ or to ‘turn it off’ if you are offended by it. He points out that such a response assumes that the harm of a pornographic world is no more than ‘offensive’ to the observer:
‘Capturing Men in a Wide Net’
The global pornography industry shows little concern for subordination, degradation or human rights violations; indeed powerful elements in the industry market the violation of human rights. Meanwhile Big Porn continues to devise new ways of catching men in a global and very sticky web. In her chapter ‘To catch a curious clicker’, Jennifer A. Johnson describes how the online porn industry captures men in a vast web:
Nothing radical about mass market masturbation
People on the ‘Left’ have opposed ‘Big Pharma’ and more recently ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Society’, but many seem to fall silent in the face of ‘Big Porn’ and its predatory profit-driven practices.
19
Long-time US anti-porn campaigner, Nikki Craft, takes ‘progressive’ anti-globalisation campaigners to task for ignoring the global profit machine of Big Porn.
20
There is, however, nothing to be celebrated in the dehumanising global commodification of women in pornography. There is nothing revolutionary about mass-marketed masturbation. Radical big-picture thinking requires that we connect the global pornography industry to other social justice issues, in order to acknowledge the lack of justice in the reduction of human beings to objects of exchange.
Pornography today presents elements of every kind of barbarism imaginable – from overt fascist celebrations of racial hatred, to the killing of animals for sexual entertainment. And yet, for many people it still passes as ‘cool’, as just a bit of fun, as sexual ‘lulz’, something to emulate and celebrate. In the brave new world of pornochic, ethical boundaries are for wowsers and bores.
Contributors to
Big Porn Inc
Our contributors are from diverse backgrounds and countries, with a range of views on social and ethical issues. But they are in broad agreement on the harms of pornography. We have divided
Big Porn Inc
into 5 Parts: Pornography Cultures, Pornography Industries, Harming Children, Pornography and the State, and lastly, a section on global activism, Resisting Big Porn Inc.
21
Each Part opens with extracts from personal accounts shared with us during the writing of this book (and some sourced online) so that we remember that real people suffer real harm through pornography.
We begin the book with a personal reflection by Caroline (a pseudonym) who remembers the impact that finding her partner’s pornography had on their relationship. She captures the ordinariness and the normalisation of pornography in women’s lives as she states: “I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket
queue.” In Part 2, Stella (a pseudonym) describes the destructive impact of dancing in a strip club and her grief that continues 12 years later. In Part 3, ‘Amy’ writes of how the abuse of pornography is re-experienced over and over. All 3 women voice the profound sense of loss, shame and humiliation they experienced in reflecting on how pornography touched their lives. But they also give voice to the courage to expose what happened to them – for the sake of others.
These contributions illustrate how pornography has become integrated into our cultural norms. In Part 1, Pornography Cultures, Gail Dines argues that Pseudo Child Pornography, in which girls over the age of 18 are represented as children, normalises and eroticises child abuse. Dines believes that this form of sexualisation weakens the norms that define children as off-limits to sexual use by men. Catharine A. MacKinnon writes about living in a world made by pornographers, and explores the many ways in which pornography has colonised our world, such that “[t]he cultural politics of pornography become normalised to the point of invisibility.” Maggie Hamilton focuses on how sexualised marketing targets children so they see pornography as a consumer good. Hamilton offers a passionate analysis of the ways in which children are sexually groomed, and in which childhood itself is controlled and defined by corporations.
Robert Jensen identifies rape culture and pornography as forms of propaganda by which the powerless are kept in line. He points out that pornography is not only sexist, but that it is also the most openly racist form of mass media today. Nina Funnell looks at how communication technologies, sexting and peer-to-peer porn affect the intimate lives of teenagers, especially how technology has multiplied the ways in which they are humiliated and abused. Diane L. Rosenfeld offers insights into an emerging extreme culture of pornography-inspired sexism on North American college campuses. She concludes that a ‘pimp and ho’ culture is glorified on campuses as exciting and desirable, creating a backdrop to sexual negotiations among college students.
Women bear the brunt of pornography culture, but men are not immune to its objectification and dehumanisation. In his chapter on the harms of gay male pornography, Christopher N. Kendall argues that sexual subordination is enforced through extreme forms of torture and violence which celebrate a masculinity founded on the abuse of vulnerable others – often feminised – in the name of sexual pleasure. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson takes on pornography and animals, exploring the academic and aesthetic condoning of women engaging in bestiality in the name of a ‘post-feminist’ self-empowerment.
Research on effects on consumers is critical to our understanding of how society is affected by pornography. Robi Sonderegger’s chapter analyses the ways
in which pornography grooms consumers into accepting the eroticisation of inequality. A number of industries have taken up the new business opportunities provided by pornography. Meagan Tyler examines how pornsex is legitimised through the industry of sex therapy and how its presentation as sexual authority threatens women’s equality. Renate Klein looks at the ideological and business links between Big Porn and Big Pharma, specifically the harms created by pornsex and reproporn. Klein calls for a future which is not a plastic ‘porn-and-pill saturated world’ where medicalisation rules, but a world full of possibilities for a creative and just life for all.
Susan Hawthorne’s chapter on lynching and torture opens Part 2, Pornography Industries. Hawthorne connects pornography to broader structures of global inequality, and identifies how porn culture feeds off the torture of people living under repressive regimes. Hawthorne also critiques ‘lesbian’ pornography while co-editor, Abigail Bray, explores how ‘post-feminist’ sex shops appropriate feminist rhetoric about sexual liberation and empowerment in order to promote and sell sex industry products. In an examination of
The Porn Report
, Helen Pringle provides an incisive discussion of the growing business of academic defences of pornography, and the striking indifference to harm on which they rest. Co-editor, Melinda Tankard Reist, investigates the marketing of pornography in her chapter on the Sexpo trade fair, which describes the open racism and misogyny promoted at such events.
[p]hysical aggression occurred in 88 per cent of scenes … Across all acts of aggression – both physical and verbal – 94 per cent were directed towards women … When aggressed against, 95 per cent of targets responded with either expressions of pleasure (encouragement, sexual moans, and so forth) or neutrally (e.g. no change in facial expression or interruption of actions) (Bridges 2010, p. 46; see also Sun, this volume).
An insight into the abuse and violence visited on porn performers is graphically depicted in the photo documentary account ‘They shoot porn stars don’t they?’ by Susannah Breslin (2009). She describes how a woman, pulled into the porn industry to support her children, is subjected to verbal abuse and torture:He threatens to beat her, threatens to torture her, pulls up her shirt, pulls up her skirt, hits her breasts, hits her thighs, throttles her by the neck with both hands, humiliates her, degrades her, makes her cry, chokes her until she is gasping for air. He gets her to tell the camera she is 27 years old and the only reason she’s here doing this particular job on this particularly day in this particular hotel room in the Valley is for the money, and the fact of the matter is she has two young children to support, of whom the man asks rhetorically, and seemingly for the sole purpose of screwing with her head, ‘They’re going to grow up to be proud of you, right?’
The woman is becoming unmoored. He orders her on her hands and knees, and begins beating her with a leather strap that
cracks!
across the bared skin of her backside every time he hits her, leaving angry pink welts, until, finally, in a futile attempt to protect herself, the woman reaches her arm around herself, her hand turned upwards, her palm facing outwards, and the man stops … ‘To steal a Quentin Tarantino line,’ he muses, mockingly, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’
We give space in this book to the experience of girls and women used to make pornography and how their suffering doesn’t end because their images are circulated for eternity (see Pringle, and Amy’s Victim Impact Statement, this volume). As Amy, whose sexual abuse is known as the ‘Misty Series’ of child pornography images, writes: “I did not choose to be there, but now I am there forever in pictures that people are using to do sick things.”The woman is becoming unmoored. He orders her on her hands and knees, and begins beating her with a leather strap that
cracks!
across the bared skin of her backside every time he hits her, leaving angry pink welts, until, finally, in a futile attempt to protect herself, the woman reaches her arm around herself, her hand turned upwards, her palm facing outwards, and the man stops … ‘To steal a Quentin Tarantino line,’ he muses, mockingly, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’
An industry unregulated and uncontrolled
Compounding the abuse so often involved in the making of pornography is a lack of regulation of the industry in all its forms. The shelves of corner stores and petrol stations are stacked with pornography promoting sex with ‘live young girls’, rape and incest, while pornography distributors continually flout Australia’s classification laws (see Tankard Reist, 2008). Abigail Bray has described an Internet site called
Passed Out Pussy
which incites crimes of violence against women and girls, and endorses rape, torture and hatred upon the bodies of young women (Bray, 2009). Other sites revel in the torture and enslavement of women.
For example, Ken Franzblau has written about photos on the ‘Slavefarm’ site: “These are pictures of naked women bound, gagged, chained, in a stock, and drinking from a dog’s dish. If there is a distinction between pornography and torture, it’s not detectable from these pictures” (2007, p. 262). There are sections on the site for auctions and rentals where you can sell, rent and purchase women, as ‘Female Slaves for Sale’. These representations of women and the hatred expressed in them are reminiscent of propaganda for the 19th century slave trade (see Hawthorne, this volume).
However, against this background, attempts to bring Internet content into line with existing classification laws and the treatment of illegal material in Australia have met with virulent objection by vested interests. Requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter out a blacklist of URLs containing extreme and violent pornography has been proposed by the current (Labor) Government. This material can be legally viewed in no other medium. As Australian author and Professor of Public Ethics, Clive Hamilton, has argued:
We live in a democracy where citizens ask their governments to impose restrictions on certain types of content that are regarded as harmful to individuals or to the community more broadly. We have a censorship system governing films, television and magazines, defined by law, enforced by government bodies and with widespread community support. There is nothing special about the Internet that puts it beyond community standards (Hamilton, 2009).
But those who demand a right to view ‘legal and illegal’ pornography protested against the filtering proposal. In February, 2010, Australia’s Parliament Houseand Federal Government Websites were shut down in a cyber-attack and inboxes of members of parliament were flooded with pornography (Davis, 2010). This sense of entitlement to ‘our pornography’ entails defending the ‘right’ of the pornography industry to market child rape, violation of women and girls, and female slavery to anonymous consumers, all in the name of freedom of speech. If we consider this ethically acceptable, whose rights are we defending?
The Swedish scholar, Max Waltman, has analysed the shielding of these kinds of abuses behind the screen of ‘free speech’. He details numerous cases where law makers, judges, and other arbiters dismiss claims against even some of the most violent pornography, or where those in breach of various laws in various countries are only given ‘penalties’, such as community service.
Waltman responds to the common refrain of pornography defenders to ‘avert your eyes’ or to ‘turn it off’ if you are offended by it. He points out that such a response assumes that the harm of a pornographic world is no more than ‘offensive’ to the observer:
Closing your eyes will not prevent women from being raped, battered, or tortured by intimate partners being inspired and impelled by pornography though. Nor will it help adolescent girls forced out on streets, coerced into imitating pornography upon thousands of clients’ requests, to escape the sexual abuse. Defining harm as an offence to observers silences and denies these women their rights (Waltman, 2009, p.12).
Like Waltman, our primary concern with pornography is not that it is offensive (although it often is), but that it is subordination and degradation – mostly of women. It is a human rights issue.‘Capturing Men in a Wide Net’
The global pornography industry shows little concern for subordination, degradation or human rights violations; indeed powerful elements in the industry market the violation of human rights. Meanwhile Big Porn continues to devise new ways of catching men in a global and very sticky web. In her chapter ‘To catch a curious clicker’, Jennifer A. Johnson describes how the online porn industry captures men in a vast web:
Upon his arrival, he is entangled in a series of click manoeuvres and marketing gimmicks calculated to further reduce his agency and transform him from the ‘curious clicker’ into the ‘member clicker’ (p. 148) … men are drawn into the online commercial pornography network, where they find themselves enmeshed in a well constructed set of relationships designed to extract maximum profits through the circumscription of consumer choice. The structure of the network is designed to prevent ‘leavers’ … by restricting and/or obfuscating (male) consumer choice (2010, p. 153).
It is remarkable that civil libertarians can see this level of manipulation into industrialised sex as something for freedom-loving people to celebrate.Nothing radical about mass market masturbation
People on the ‘Left’ have opposed ‘Big Pharma’ and more recently ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Society’, but many seem to fall silent in the face of ‘Big Porn’ and its predatory profit-driven practices.
19
Long-time US anti-porn campaigner, Nikki Craft, takes ‘progressive’ anti-globalisation campaigners to task for ignoring the global profit machine of Big Porn.
20
There is, however, nothing to be celebrated in the dehumanising global commodification of women in pornography. There is nothing revolutionary about mass-marketed masturbation. Radical big-picture thinking requires that we connect the global pornography industry to other social justice issues, in order to acknowledge the lack of justice in the reduction of human beings to objects of exchange.
Pornography today presents elements of every kind of barbarism imaginable – from overt fascist celebrations of racial hatred, to the killing of animals for sexual entertainment. And yet, for many people it still passes as ‘cool’, as just a bit of fun, as sexual ‘lulz’, something to emulate and celebrate. In the brave new world of pornochic, ethical boundaries are for wowsers and bores.
Contributors to
Big Porn Inc
Our contributors are from diverse backgrounds and countries, with a range of views on social and ethical issues. But they are in broad agreement on the harms of pornography. We have divided
Big Porn Inc
into 5 Parts: Pornography Cultures, Pornography Industries, Harming Children, Pornography and the State, and lastly, a section on global activism, Resisting Big Porn Inc.
21
Each Part opens with extracts from personal accounts shared with us during the writing of this book (and some sourced online) so that we remember that real people suffer real harm through pornography.
We begin the book with a personal reflection by Caroline (a pseudonym) who remembers the impact that finding her partner’s pornography had on their relationship. She captures the ordinariness and the normalisation of pornography in women’s lives as she states: “I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket
queue.” In Part 2, Stella (a pseudonym) describes the destructive impact of dancing in a strip club and her grief that continues 12 years later. In Part 3, ‘Amy’ writes of how the abuse of pornography is re-experienced over and over. All 3 women voice the profound sense of loss, shame and humiliation they experienced in reflecting on how pornography touched their lives. But they also give voice to the courage to expose what happened to them – for the sake of others.
These contributions illustrate how pornography has become integrated into our cultural norms. In Part 1, Pornography Cultures, Gail Dines argues that Pseudo Child Pornography, in which girls over the age of 18 are represented as children, normalises and eroticises child abuse. Dines believes that this form of sexualisation weakens the norms that define children as off-limits to sexual use by men. Catharine A. MacKinnon writes about living in a world made by pornographers, and explores the many ways in which pornography has colonised our world, such that “[t]he cultural politics of pornography become normalised to the point of invisibility.” Maggie Hamilton focuses on how sexualised marketing targets children so they see pornography as a consumer good. Hamilton offers a passionate analysis of the ways in which children are sexually groomed, and in which childhood itself is controlled and defined by corporations.
Robert Jensen identifies rape culture and pornography as forms of propaganda by which the powerless are kept in line. He points out that pornography is not only sexist, but that it is also the most openly racist form of mass media today. Nina Funnell looks at how communication technologies, sexting and peer-to-peer porn affect the intimate lives of teenagers, especially how technology has multiplied the ways in which they are humiliated and abused. Diane L. Rosenfeld offers insights into an emerging extreme culture of pornography-inspired sexism on North American college campuses. She concludes that a ‘pimp and ho’ culture is glorified on campuses as exciting and desirable, creating a backdrop to sexual negotiations among college students.
Women bear the brunt of pornography culture, but men are not immune to its objectification and dehumanisation. In his chapter on the harms of gay male pornography, Christopher N. Kendall argues that sexual subordination is enforced through extreme forms of torture and violence which celebrate a masculinity founded on the abuse of vulnerable others – often feminised – in the name of sexual pleasure. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson takes on pornography and animals, exploring the academic and aesthetic condoning of women engaging in bestiality in the name of a ‘post-feminist’ self-empowerment.
Research on effects on consumers is critical to our understanding of how society is affected by pornography. Robi Sonderegger’s chapter analyses the ways
in which pornography grooms consumers into accepting the eroticisation of inequality. A number of industries have taken up the new business opportunities provided by pornography. Meagan Tyler examines how pornsex is legitimised through the industry of sex therapy and how its presentation as sexual authority threatens women’s equality. Renate Klein looks at the ideological and business links between Big Porn and Big Pharma, specifically the harms created by pornsex and reproporn. Klein calls for a future which is not a plastic ‘porn-and-pill saturated world’ where medicalisation rules, but a world full of possibilities for a creative and just life for all.
Susan Hawthorne’s chapter on lynching and torture opens Part 2, Pornography Industries. Hawthorne connects pornography to broader structures of global inequality, and identifies how porn culture feeds off the torture of people living under repressive regimes. Hawthorne also critiques ‘lesbian’ pornography while co-editor, Abigail Bray, explores how ‘post-feminist’ sex shops appropriate feminist rhetoric about sexual liberation and empowerment in order to promote and sell sex industry products. In an examination of
The Porn Report
, Helen Pringle provides an incisive discussion of the growing business of academic defences of pornography, and the striking indifference to harm on which they rest. Co-editor, Melinda Tankard Reist, investigates the marketing of pornography in her chapter on the Sexpo trade fair, which describes the open racism and misogyny promoted at such events.
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
12.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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